Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (general ebook reader .TXT) 📗

long she effortlessly skated and shoveled, skated and shoveled, skated and shoveled, like a meditation—until Poppy’s voice slowly reached her out on the middle of the pond.

“Gina, my hands are frozen. I can’t get my skates on. Help!”

Goddammit. Poppy was still sitting in the sled, her stocking feet wrapped in the caribou hide.

What the hell do you know about frozen fingers? Gina thought, pushing away the image of the pencil, the mangled claw like a chicken’s foot clutched around it.

She skated backward over the path she’d just created, dragging the shovel along with her. Gina was an expert at skating backward, almost as if her feet had known that life was going to look better in reverse and somehow she could manage it more smoothly in retrospect. Her knees slightly bent, she flowed across the ice like butter melting in a hot skillet, her blades etching curvy lines into the crust of the pond—the sound calming her down, helping her forget. Until she got back to where Poppy sat.

“Why did you take your damn mittens off?”

“They’re too big,” Poppy whined, her eyes wide on Gina’s face, as if she thought Gina might explode. Well, it was certainly possible.

Gina threw off her own mittens and threaded Poppy’s laces through the holes with lightning speed. It would take only seconds for her hands to freeze, too, so she had to be fast.

“Okay, quick. Get your feet in there.”

Poppy’s feet looked round, like an elephant’s, in four pairs of woolen socks, one of which Gina’s mom had knit her years and years ago. She closed her mind to keep out any image resembling knitting needles and long, slender, healthy fingers.

“Greta says you remind her of a starfish,” Poppy was saying.

“A what?”

“A starfish.”

Gina had forgotten that Greta and Poppy were cousins. Greta was a few years older than Gina, but they often tried out for the same dance parts, and the competition between them was historic. In truth, since Greta was older and the better dancer, it hadn’t made sense for Gina to get the better parts, but Greta missed a lot of rehearsals fishing with her granddad every summer.

If Gina worked hard, she often landed roles that should have gone to Greta. Gina had been so competitive and maybe more than a little smug about it. But that was before.

After her mom died, Gina had simply been cast in the lead roles and nobody said anything anymore about tryouts. It bothered her, but if she complained, then what? Would someone ask her to talk about how she felt? She hated that they gave her the cherished leads—pity roles?—and then stared sympathetically at her while she danced.

In a small town, you are forever defined by the worst thing that ever happened to you.

And just like her mother dying, she didn’t know how to stop it.

“How am I like a starfish? That’s ridiculous.” She thought it might have something to do with the word “star” being misapplied, but Gina was surprised as Poppy plowed on, unaware that she might be treading dangerously close to the thin ice that was Gina’s temper.

“Greta says starfish are actually bad.”

“Well, isn’t Greta just an expert on everything.”

“No, I mean bad for the fishermen. Starfish eat the bait off their hooks.”

“How is it that I’m eating anyone’s bait?”

Gina had no idea where this was going. And it was getting cold sitting in one spot.

“Poppy, we have to skate. We’re going to freeze.”

“Okay.”

Poppy wanted to hold her hand and Gina knew it, but she skated off before that could happen. Backward. She watched the younger girl struggle to get her stride in Gina’s old skates, which were too big despite all those socks. The beaver-skin hat kept slipping over Poppy’s eyes, so every two seconds she had to push it up again. The girl was drowning in animal fur. What would Libby say if Gina brought Poppy back as a wriggling beaver and said she didn’t know how it had happened? Maybe Libby would be furious and never come back to their house. Gina wouldn’t mind if Libby stayed away, especially at night.

She hated thinking of Libby in her mother’s bed, changing the smell of the sheets and pillows. She didn’t care what her father did with Libby; she just wanted him to do it somewhere else, because she was starting to forget her mother.

The sheets had always smelled like lavender and mint and wet dogs. Bits of dog hair clung to everything because the washing machine was full of dog hair, so even clean, all their laundry was furry. But once Libby had started staying over, the sheets smelled more like coffee and chocolate and some flower Gina couldn’t identify.

Sometimes Gina sat in her mother’s closet and breathed in her clothes, which was like sitting in a bog near ripe, low bush cranberries, because her mom had spent so many hours picking that smashed berry juice permanently saturated her sweaters and the knees of her jeans. But that too was slowly fading; it had already been over a year. As long as there was a hint of moldy cranberry emanating from that closet, maybe her mom would never really be gone.

—

“Wait up, Gina!”

Poppy skated clumsily, chopping at the ice as if her skates were axes. Gina slowed and made lazy figure eights, waiting for her. When Poppy caught up, Gina relented and grabbed the girl’s hands, hoping to pick up the pace. “How am I like a starfish?” she asked, wishing she didn’t care.

Poppy was panting and holding hard to Gina’s wrists. “Well, if you chop a leg off a starfish, it just grows back. And if you chop it in half, it will grow two bodies.”

Gina stared at her. “So?”

“Well, Greta said the fishermen who are green—you know, the new ones? They don’t know this. When they pull the gear up on their lines, if the hooks are full of starfish that ate all the bait, the fishermen get so mad they chop up the starfish and throw